EDITORIAL: Kingston targets guns

The Kingston Police Department has a new program intended to reduce gun crime.

Chief Egidio Tinti said the program will pay up to $1,000 in cash or gift cards to people who turn in guns used in crimes or provide tips about the locations of such guns.

Mayor Shayne Gallo said he hopes "this will lessen the amount of unregistered guns in our community."

Maybe it will, however marginally. At least it's targeted in the right direction.

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Your run-of-the-mill gun buyback program, such as also practiced here in Kingston, has been found to collect weapons at the wrong end of the spectrum of hazard. Some of the collected firearms are broken, some are on the path to obsolescence, and many are held by people who are unlikely to use a firearm in any event.

Further, spot buyback programs are like trying to keep the Titanic afloat by baling with a bucket.

We are, after all, a people awash in firearms, from sea to shining sea.

With an estimated 250 million to 300 million firearms in private hands across this great land, the hard, cold fact is that America is one hellaciously, big gun bazaar. Further, the secondary market for weapons is largely unregulated once weapons leave the shelves of licensed dealers. No buyback program in little, ol' Kingston, N.Y., is likely to stem more than incidentally the flow of weapons available on local streets for firearms crimes.

One buyback program is known to have decreased firearms violence, but that was in Australia, where the national government in 1996 bought guns from citizens after banning automatic and semi-automatic weapons, as well as shotguns. An estimated 20 percent of civilian firearms were destroyed.

According to former Prime Minister John Howard, Australia has had no mass firearms homicides since 1996, which contrasts to 13 such massacres, resulting in 102 deaths, in the 18 years prior to the national law.

During the two-year buyback, firearm homicides dropped by 46 percent and firearm suicides by 43 percent.

There was no offsetting increase in non-firearm-related murders, according to Howard.

That successful buyback program, however, was built upon legislative compulsion. The Second Amendment protection of gun ownership and possession in the United States makes it non-replicable here.

Who says? The Supreme Court of the United States says. And that's not going to change, a fact with which gun-control advocates must come to grips.

The new Kingston program at least does have the virtue of attempting to target the right weapons from the right crowd. It targets firearms already being used illegally, which is to say, largely by young men.